Gordon Brown: an unlikely conversion

Gordon Brown's epiphany over the plight of the middle classes first surfaced a week ago in an article in Prospect magazine, in which he said they were "Labour's number one priority". He continued in similar vein in his Brighton conference speech, throwing himself and his Government at the disposal of the "squeezed middle classes", insisting their values are his values, "the values I grew up with in an ordinary family in an ordinary town".

The people of Middle Britain will rightly treat this with a mixture of bewilderment and anger. They have endured a Labour decade of punitive tax rises (up by £1,250 for the average family in the past five years alone), failing public services and a deluge of invasive and unnecessary regulation. Labour's number one priority? More like Labour's number one cash cow. This systematic exploitation may have been tolerable during an economic boom and while Tony Blair, who did understand middle-class aspirations, was at the helm. In a recession, however, and with the arch-exponent of big government, tax and spend, tribal politics in control, it has become insufferable.

Yet it is the middle classes that decide elections, not Mr Brown's state clientele, whose interests he has always striven to oblige. Hence his thoroughly unconvincing conversion (prompted, it seems, by Lord Mandelson) to their cause. Let the Prime Minister be in no doubt: for his claims to have any credibility, he would have to change the habits of a political lifetime. He would have to stop piling on taxes, curb intrusive (and usually unnecessary) new laws, get the state off people's backs and encourage self-reliance through bottom-up rather than top-down politics. Does this sound likely? Hardly. Yet if Mr Brown thinks sweet words will be enough, he shows that he does not understand the squeezed middle at all.